The University of the Virgin Islands AAUP chapter received good news in February when a superior court in the Virgin Islands affirmed that faculty at UVI are eligible for collective bargaining. The ruling came after a five-year struggle with a hostile administration. In fall 2003, the UVI faculty reestablished its chapter of the AAUP, and within a few months, a majority of the faculty had joined the chapter.

Faculty at the University of Nebraska at Omaha received good news this month when Nebraska’s Commission on Industrial Relations upheld an arbitrator’s decision to award 3.8 percent annual pay raises for the next two years to faculty in the AAUP collective bargaining chapter there. The commission also upheld an increase in employer-paid life-insurance benefits. The university’s board of regents had appealed the arbitrator’s decision, and the administration had proposed raises of 2.9 percent and 2.5 percent in the next two years.

The Suffolk Affiliated Faculty (SAF-AAUP) part-time faculty chapter signed its first contract with Suffolk University this June, bringing a welcome conclusion to three-year-long negotiations. The chapter has much cause to celebrate. The Suffolk administration acceded to part-time faculty members’ demands that they be compensated for extra classroom time that was a consequence of a course-credit restructuring plan; this resulted in 30 to 45 percent pay raises between 2007 and 2010, with annual increases of 3.5 percent in subsequent years.

KM: Article 11.G speaks to the conversion of a full-time faculty member into a tenure-track faculty member, while Article 11.H is geared toward the conversion of an FTE temporary faculty line into a tenure-track line. The former places the emphasis on the individual faculty member, the latter seeks to prevent systemic staffing of particular areas of the curriculum by temporary faculty members.

As a group, college teachers are replaceable parts, and when one of us is replaced, perhaps the only thing it is possible to say with confidence about the new model is that she will cost less. Anyone looking at higher education today can see that the tuition and fees college students pay keep outpacing inflation. But fewer notice that college teachers’ compensation plays almost no role in these increasing costs and may actually have a dampening effect. After all, an ever-more-contingent faculty means a cheaper faculty.

As the AAUP moves toward implementation of its restructuring plan and the creation of a traditional 501c(5) labor union, we should ask ourselves how we can further enhance the effectiveness and visibility of those parts of our organization that are involved in collective bargaining.

For the past fifteen years, the state of Rhode Island has contracted with the University of Rhode Island to fund approximately ten graduate assistants in the physical therapy department in exchange for each providing ten hours a week of physical therapy to patients at Eleanor Slater Hospital, which houses patients with acute and long-term medical illness, as well as those with psychiatric disorders. But that funding was eliminated in the last round of state budget cuts. Those students are without funding and the patients are without physical therapy.